


Send Your Name Up: Postmortem associations in the Post-Resurrection Myriad, a multidisciplinary review

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, HtN spoilers, Missing Scene, judith you've been awful quiet; where ya keeping the wizard hut, secret NZ jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:08:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25926418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: The first thing is the creation of the known universe, the second is the Resurrection, and the third is a  locked study full of love letters and a dead man’s bones. These will form the basis of the following work, as below:Camilla Hect picks up the pieces in the wake of Canaan House.Contains spoilers for Harrow the Ninth
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Coronabeth Tridentarius, Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 20
Kudos: 110





	Send Your Name Up: Postmortem associations in the Post-Resurrection Myriad, a multidisciplinary review

Some context:

The first thing is the creation of the known universe, the second is the Resurrection, and the third is a locked study full of love letters and a dead man’s bones. These will form the basis of the following work, as below:

Interior, time indeterminate, the Master Warden’s quarters. Palamedes stands with his back to his cavalier, staring intently at the glossy plex of a whiteboard. She can see his reflection moving dimly across the surface of it, milkily indistinct, knuckling at his lower lip. His glasses, as ever, are crooked on his face.

“Unprecedented, Warden.” Cam says to his shoulder, “Also untested. Quite possibly insane.”

Despite the murkiness of the reflection, his eyes are shockingly clear—luminously, cinerously, perfectly grey, wide behind his glasses for a split second, then shuttered by the sweep of his lashes, startlingly long. He huffs a chagrined little noise, something like laughter, but from another country entirely. It falls awkwardly from his mouth.

“Avant-garde, surely. Cutting edge.”

It is. If it works, it could be a foundational shift in spirit magic as a discipline, and not only would the Fifth and the Eighth have the kind of collective aneurysm any Scholar would dream sweaty, ecstatic dreams about their academic rivals having, but he would get to teach the whole thing, too, and write all the seminal papers.

 _Seminal_ —Cam almost snorts. Decides not to. 

If it works, it will mean that he died, likely violently, almost _necessarily_ violently, and suddenly, and that she wasn’t able to stop it, which is not only a seeping wound in the pit of her soul, but also, frankly, insulting.

Cam pushes into the balls of her feet, then her heels, back and forth like a wading bird. She stares at the back of Palamedes’ neck, knobbly and brown, a saw-edged mountain ridge of vertebral processes pushed up too close against the skin—pushed even sharper now that he’s got his head bowed, avoiding her eyes, because he knows what he’s asking, and he knows it’s not fair. It would be very easy for somebody to break his neck.

Cam says:

“This is the single-stupidest thing you have ever attempted since you tried to erupt your own wisdom teeth when we were sixteen. If you’re wrong—”

He laughs again, a startled, plosive bark like he’s been punched in the gut. Palamedes peels his glasses from his face one-handed, scrubbing at his forehead with the back of his hand.

“When am I ever?”

He says:

“I will point out, by the way, that that _did_ work, strictly speaking.”

She’ll say yes. She knows it, and he knows it, and they’re both disappointed, a little bit, by the fact. Truth over solace. Truth over peace, over peace of mind.

Cam steps forward, and presses her forehead to the ridge of his spine.

“Alright.”

[x]

In considering the creation of the known universe, and the Resurrection, and the study full of bones, the salient point is that in the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was God, but very few of God’s Pre-Resurrection writings survived intact, and the hardest thing in the world is to give your word and keep it, and make sure it doesn’t go anywhere. In the beginning, it was dark, which likely helped preserve the Word from degradation due to UV exposure.

Exterior, Canaan House, morning.

Camilla Hect sifts through the dirt on her knees, hands moving like small, hungry animals over the scoured, blackened wood floor. The dawn blooms like a bruise behind her. The light has the stagnant, grey-purple tinge of post-mortem lividity, pooling around yesterday’s extremities. There is a fistfull of pens and an extra pair of glasses jabbing insistently into her hip. There isn’t enough time.

She has to find the bones by touch, and Canaan House is old, and extremely full of bones. Camilla Hect is no adept. She has to think _He would’ve sat by the bed_ , and then go looking for the charred husk of bed. Think _He would’ve faced her_ , and try to plot the course of the—the blast. Has to fish a piece of flimsy out of her pocket to check her math. There is a patch of wood under her feet, barely a foot square, still miraculously untouched.

There isn’t enough time to do things right. There’s barely enough time to do them thoroughly, and the worst thing is the impulse to think:

_Did you have to go like **this**? _

To stand there, looking at nothing, and say to the dead vines and the ruined furniture:

“You are aware, Warden, I can’t just grab your—”

 _Bone_ chips. God, but could he not have picked a cleaner way to die, a more considerate way to die, one with fewer—pieces?

Camilla cradles the fizz of anger to her chest the way you would a mug of coffee, pressed tight between her palms. She sips at the feeling slowly, lets it run hot down the back of her throat, just enough to get her up. Just enough to get her moving. Just because she tells herself that she would know his bones anywhere, because they were his, but Camilla is no adept, and there are a _lot_ of fucking bones in Canaan House. She finds Palamedes’, more often than not, because the shards prick her fingertips as she rakes over the walls. They jab into her cuticles with a puppyish eagerness. The largest is the size of her thumbprint, the smallest barely bigger than the leukonychiac fleck huddled at the base of her smallest fingernail.

Camilla tweezes the fragments out of the walls and the floor and she puts them in a little cloth bag. Cam tweezes the gritty, howling grief out of her skull, and she puts it in a box.

Puts the box away

The bag she puts around her neck. The box, Cam keeps right _there_ , locked up under her ribs, and it will stay right _there_ , Cam keeps everything right there, in the box, and then one day, she’ll die.

[x]

Matter can neither be created, nor destroyed. The universe was created, then it was Resurrected, which is to say that everything there is used to be something else. That the differences between things are very slight, once you start to do the math. The difference between a letter and a love letter is about six words. The difference between a live man and a dead one is love. The difference between the man you love and one you wouldn’t recognize is that one of them is dead. The difference between a wooden puzzle box and three inches of skull is that one of those things is a hell of a lot easier to glue back together.

Interior, shuttle. One desk, one lamp, 96 fragments of human skull, male, early twenties.

It doesn’t feel like bone. 

It’s easiest to talk about it like Archaeo does, to say that the bones burned very hot, and very fast, and this fused shut many of the pores extant within the tissue as the calcium crystallized in the heat; this, per Archaeo, can be desirable from a purely physically conversational standpoint, the resultant bone will be harder, and thus more durable in the context of _in-situ_ examination immediately following exhumation. Per everyone else in Archaeo, it fucks up the readings, and has anyone seen Exinta’s pamphlet? Joke-propaganda thing, they pass it out to beg people to help them ban funerary cremation, they’ve got graphs. Admin was in stitches.

The bone feels almost like porcelain, scorched beautifully white. She could be restoring a vase.

Close-in on the desk. A pair of tweezers stabbed into the surface, straddling a discarded paintbrush with bristles the width of an eyelash. A pot of glue, chemical, the scent of which strips her nostrils like it’s trying to sell them for parts. The desk lamp oozes a papery-yellow light over the huddled assemblage, freezing it in amber.

Cam presses the back of her thumb to her nose, knuckling up into the vomer against the acrid reek of the glue. It is a gesture very like the way her necromancer used to thumb at his nosebleeds, when the blood-sweat came out as nosebleeds. 

She sighs, and picks up the tweezers again, hunching into the light. Camilla fits one piece to the next, squinting at splinters. She could be restoring a vase. She is not restoring a vase. She has to keep stopping herself from licking at the brush, freezing with the eyelash tip of it halfway to her mouth again and again and again.

She doesn’t talk while she works. What would she say?

He shouldn’t have asked, and she shouldn’t have agreed, and he shouldn’t have done what he did, but if he hadn’t, he would’ve been somebody else, and none of it would have mattered anyway, because she would never have done this for anybody else.

Figure 3: 

Skull, male, early twenties. Newly dead. Signs of extensive thermal trauma at time of death. Extant bone includes partial supraorbital ridge, partial parietal. Zygomatic process intact. See Table 3 for analysis.

[x]

Creation of known universe, Resurrection, study. The study, as stated, is locked. The essential _locked_ -ness of the study is important. Grief in a box. Bones in a bag Cam keeps around her neck. All of these things comprise a closed system.

The problem is that they are very similar people.

Coronabeth talks like she’s always expecting somebody else to chime in; her sentences stutter in the middle like film stuck in a projector when the insults never come.

The problem is that Cam’s single-word dead-pans are not what she’s looking for. She talks like like’s expecting somebody to chime, and Cam chimes in, and they snag on the barb-wire fences of each other and it’s honestly just a fucking mess. 

“I should’ve taken something with me,” Corona sniffles, “something of our—of hers.”

All grief is alien. Corona’s does something unpleasant to her face, like taking a razorblade to a painting. She presses her wrist to her mouth and says, “She always stole my shoes. Bitch. I should’ve taken something from her, too. At least, you, you’ve got…”

Interior, living quarters. Corona takes the pilot’s bed, because it’s the biggest, and she’s the tallest, and the most used to getting what she’s asked for.

She gestures vaguely at Cam’s neck, and in the wake of this motion, her stays hand open, arm outstretched, a winter branch waiting for something to land. Cam curls her fingers into Corona’s.

Corona reaches up with her other hand, testing the weight of her finger against the cord around Cam’s neck, carelessly, the way that rich people are with somebody’s else’s property, and Cam pushes her hand back with a hard jerk.

“If we’re doing this. The reliquary stays on.”

Corona blinks at her, wet-eyed and baffled.

“The reliquary stays on during sex.” Cam repeats, and it hurts, because repeating herself like that gives her a headache.

She never used to have to.

[x]

Table 3:

Not everything is like something else. Sometimes, it’s just not enough. The mind sees patterns where there are none.

Anyway, it’ll need an adept, to see if he’s in there. 

[x]

To review:

Universe, Resurrection, Study. Bones, bag. Grief, box.

Onward.

Interior, shuttle, navigation array.

Camilla pinches the bridge of her nose, squinting at the transmission they've managed to intercept. Blood of Eden’s intel ciphers are not especially difficult to crack, and this one is no different. Alternately, it is _very_ different, and constitutes a _ludicrously_ difficult cipher to crack, because the resultant message makes absolutely no goddamn sense.

“‘Where is wizard hut?’,” Cam reads out flatly. Behind her, bent so low over her shoulder that her cheek brushes Cam’s temple, Corona frowns.

“No, read the whole thing again, there was something after—“ 

“It’s _four_ _words_ , the core subject of which is ‘where is wizard hut’, and then roughly thirty words of someone having a panic attack.” Cam snaps, gesturing at the screen, “Full text: ‘Where is wizard hut? I can't find it and I'm try to find it and I need to find it. Please, where is? I can't find it. I can't find it and I'm trying to find it, help me please.’”

“And you think—what, exactly? That the Ninth is…”

“At the wizard hut. One assumes. We’re on course to—”

 _God_. Wizard Hut. Warden would absolutely piss himself laughing. Cam swallows.

“To where she should be.”

She sighs. Corona drops her cheek into Cam’s hair, nuzzling quietly in the way that means _we could leave them. The past is done, we ate up the seconds, we could throw the bones away and be done with them._ Cam allows it, closing her eyes and tipping her chin up in the way that means _no, we really can’t_.

Coronabeth slips away with a petulant snarl.

You wouldn’t get a locked study on Ida. You wouldn’t claw your way out of your corpse to _almost_ finish a puzzle, and leave it undone, just to make sure you preserved whatever was inside. Nobody would come back, years and years or possibly eight months later, sick with hope, _really_ sick, migraine-nausea-chills and globus-pharyngis (likely psychosomatic, the blood-slick slime of a fear you can’t name) sick, sick and wanting and sleepless, because you just had to _know_.

She just has to know. 

[x]

Shuttle exterior, noon.

Cam steps out, and walks into the jungle, looking for bones.

**Author's Note:**

> hit ya bitch up on twitter @gin_n_chthonic, or discord @devilinwhite#6241


End file.
